MIT

Massachusetts Institute Of Technology Targeting Pro-Palestine Activists

November 25, 2024 Natalia Marques, People's Dispatch. Resist! BDS Movement, Campus Movement, Divestment, Gaza, Genocide, Israel, Massachusetts, MIT, Palestine, State Repression, Student Activism

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has taken severe measures to suppress the voices of two prominent pro-Palestine activists on campus: PhD student Prahlad Iyengar and Dr. Michel DeGraff, a professor who has taught linguistics at the university for over 28 years. Iyengar has been banned from campus, which is also his place of work, without due process. He has also been denied union representation by MIT’s administration, despite himself being a union steward. He faces imminent threat of suspension as well as expulsion. MIT prohibited Dr. Degraff from teaching a course on Palestine, suspended his annual pay raise, and had his official status at the university changed from “Professor of Linguistics” to “Faculty-at-Large,” also without due process.

MIT Divests From Israeli Arms Firm Funded Program

September 15, 2024 Al Mayadeen. Resist! BDS Movement, Boston, Campus Movement, Divestment, Higher Education, Israel, Massachusetts, MIT, Palestine

The MISTI-"Israel" Lockheed Martin fund has been shut down after continuous pressure from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT) staff and faculty, the MIT Coalition for Palestine announced on Friday, marking a major divestment win for the university's Scientists Against Genocide (SAGE) movement. "Under pressure from students and scientists of conscience at this Institute, the MIT administration has discontinued MISTI-Israel's Lockheed Martin Seed Fund and will not renew its contract," the organization said in a statement. "This was a major target of our divestment action. The program ends after months of protest against it last fall, including letter deliveries, sit-ins, and public information campaigns," it highlighted.

Harvard/MIT Students Shut Down Exxon Recruiting Event

October 13, 2022 Divest Harvard. Resist! Education, Exxon, Harvard, Massachusetts, MIT, Recruitment

Cambridge, Massachusetts - On Wednesday, around 30 members of the Harvard and MIT communities disrupted a recruiting event by ExxonMobil. The presentation, which was held in the offices of the MIT Earth and Planetary Sciences department and advertised to Harvard science students, was intended to convince students to participate in the company’s hiring process. Students at the event, however, sent a message loud and clear: So long as Exxon is undermining young people’s futures, it won’t be welcome on campus. The disruption — and a similar one, also this week at Brown — come in the wake of Exxon’s track record of exploiting vulnerable peoples and environments for its oil and gas development, while lying to the public about its ostensible pivot to greener initiatives.

MIT Graduate Students Vote To Form Union

April 7, 2022 Max Larkin, Portside. Organize! Higher Education, MIT, Unions, Worker Rights and Jobs

Graduate students at MIT have voted to form a union by a 2-to-1 margin. Organizers said the result was a response to the growing challenges facing students — who teach, conduct research and provide academic support on the Cambridge campus — and in keeping with the institute’s experimental spirit. Fifth-year doctoral student Lilly Chin leapt back into organizing to help with the get-out-the-vote campaign in the computer science department, one of MIT’s largest. “My phone was buzzing for five minutes straight: ‘Make sure so-and-so can get to the polls,’ ” Chin said. The count Wednesday happened quickly, but it was still “a little nerve-racking,” said Ki-Jana Carter, an organizer and fifth-year doctoral student in material science and engineering.

US Has Regressed To Developing Nation Status, MIT Economist Warns

April 26, 2017 Chloe Farand, www.independent.co.uk Educate! Economics, MIT

By Chloe Farand for Independent - Peter Temin says 80 per cent of the population is burdened with debt and anxious about job security. America is regressing to have the economic and political structure of a developing nation, an MIT economist has warned. Peter Temin says the world's’ largest economy has roads and bridges that look more like those in Thailand and Venezuela than those in parts of Europe. In his new book, “The Vanishing Middle Class", reviewed by the Institute for New Economic Thinking, Mr Temin says the fracture of US society is leading the middle class to disappear. The economist describes a two-track economy with on the one hand 20 per cent of the population that is educated and enjoys good jobs and supportive social networks. On the other hand, the remaining 80 per cent, he said, are part of the US’ low-wage sector, where the world of possibility has shrunk and people are burdened with debts and anxious about job security. Mr Temin used a model, which was created by Nobel Prize winner Arthur Lewis and designed to understand developing nations, to describe how far inequalities have progressed in the US.

MIT Climate Sit-In Ends As University Agrees To Work With Students

March 4, 2016 Zahra Hirji, www.insideclimatenews.org Resist! Climate Change, College Activism, Higher Education, MIT, Student Protests

By Zahra Hirji for Inside Climate News - Four months of student protests demanding fossil fuel divestment at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ended on Thursday, when school administrators and members of the student group Fossil Free MITannounced a compromise. The agreement gives students a role in crafting and tracking the university's climate policy, but the university did not budge on its refusal to partially divest MIT's $13.5 billion endowment of its holdings in fossil fuel companies, which was a major goal of many of the protesters.

MIT Sit-In For Climate Action

November 29, 2015 Sit-In For Climate Action, www.mitsitin.org Resist! Climate Change, MIT, Student Activism

By Sit-In For Climate Action. MIT’s Climate Plan doesn’t add up. So we’re sitting-in. Why we’re urging our administration to raise the ambition of their Plan. We write from the office doorstep of MIT’s President, where on October 22, we began a sit-in in response to the President’s announcement of MIT’s Plan for Action on Climate Change (hereafter ‘Plan’). As President Reif acknowledged, the Plan originally “emerged in response to” Fossil Free MIT’s ongoing call, since April 2013, for MIT to divest its now $13.5 billion endowment from fossil fuel companies. Here, we share our take on MIT’s Plan and explain why it has left us no choice but to respectfully plant ourselves, around-the-clock, along MIT’s corridor of power to call for a bolder approach. 39 DAYS (and counting...)

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